The Next Wave in Superhighways, or A Big, Fat Texas Boondoggle?

To see the future of transportation in Texas, you have to drive out to the prairie north of Austin, past the sprawling plants of Dell and Samsung, to the farthest suburbs, where wild grass and cornfields nuzzle up to McMansions with their perfect green lawns. There, giant earthmovers, their wheels taller than a Texan in his boots, are ripping up the gummy, black soil to lay a 49-mile stretch of concrete tollway. State Highway 130, at a cost of $1.5 billion, is the biggest highway project under way in the U.S. today. It is also the first test in concrete for the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC)--a radical rethinking of the nation's Eisenhower-era roadways.

The brainchild of Texas' Republican Governor, Rick Perry, the TTC would, if built, completely transform the state's highways over the next 50 years, creating a 4,000-mile network of multimodal corridors for transporting goods and people by car, truck, rail and utility line. Each corridor would have six lanes for cars, four additional lanes for 18-wheel trucks, half a dozen rail lines and a utility zone for moving oil and water, gas and electricity, even broadband data. The corridors could measure up to a quarter of a mile across. The projected cost, at least $183 billion, is more than the original price tag for the entire U.S. interstate system. But Texas, going it alone, is seeking private companies to take on the mammoth job of constructing, financing, operating and maintaining the network. To pay for the roads, developers will rely on a familiar but long-neglected method of financing: tollbooths.

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Depending on whom you talk to, the Trans-Texas Corridor is either an innovative solution to the U.S.'s overcrowded highway system or a Texas-size boondoggle. Backers claim that such corridors are needed to divert road and rail traffic — NAFTA truckers driving up from Mexico, railcars of Chinese goods from Western ports, hazardous cargoes of all kinds — from congested urban areas. Buying land for the system now, decades before it's needed, would cut acquisition costs and might entice businesses to relocate inside the corridors. T. Boone Pickens could ship his West Texas water across the state in pipelines through the corridors; oil and gas could be shipped north from Mexico; even high-speed passenger rail lines could become reality. "The Trans-Texas Corridor is not just a road, not just asphalt," says Perry. "It's a vision."

Opponents of the corridor range from environmentalists (the Sierra Club has called it "evil") to the Texas Republican Party, which has urged the legislature to repeal it. Texas, which is losing more land to sprawl than any other state, would need more than 9,000 sq. mi. of right-of-way for the corridors, affecting critical wetlands and pristine prairie lands. The Big Thicket National Preserve, considered "the biological crossroads of North America" for its mix of habitats, was put on the list of most-endangered parks by the National Parks Conservation Association this year, in part because of the threat from the Perry plan.

Environmentalists have found an unlikely ally in traditionally conservative landowners worried about property rights. David Langford, an activist for the Texas Wildlife Association, is organizing farmers and ranchers whose land could be cut in half or condemned by the Trans-Texas Corridor. An early plan for central Texas showed a corridor passing near the homestead Langford's family settled in 1851. With the state's new "quick claim" ability — granted under TTC legislation — his family homestead could be gone in 90 days, he says, transferred to private investors operating the corridor. Though he would be compensated financially, he's still steamed. "I can't believe Rick Perry's grandfather would want his house and ranch taken and turned over to Paris Hilton's family to build a hotel on one of these roads," he says.